Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

INTRODUCTION.
The Baptist movement in history has always been back to the New Testament.
This people has always refused to follow others away from the teaching and
practice of that book. In the New Testament are plainly stated certain great
principles which lie as foundation stones in the base of the Church of Christ.
These principles are the regeneration of the believer by the Holy Spirit and the
word of God, the baptism of the believer in water, the equality of believers in
the church, the separation of church and State, and in the church the sole
authority of the Bible. But these distinctive principles of Christianity were
soon set aside and Jewish or pagan notions were put in their places. The
doctrine of regeneration by the Spirit, and the word was the first to be
abandoned and in its place was introduced the notion of regeneration by water.
To water, a material element, was ascribed the virtue which the New
Testament gives to the word as the seed of life. With the attention directed to
the performance of a sacrament instead of to hearing and believing the word, it
was not long before the churches Were filled with members who were
Christians by sacrament, who had the form of godliness, who had a name to
live, but were dead.
Then it was about 150, A.D. that the first Baptist protest was raised by the
Montanists. The Montanists with all their faults, stand in the line of the
Apostles. They raised their voices against the increasing formalism and
worldliness of the churches and proclaimed an ever present Holy Spirit in the
hearts of believers. They were wrong in magnifying fasting and forbidding
second marriage, but were right in looking for the Holy Spirit not without in
forms, but within in the heart. This is the chief mark of the Baptist movement
in history, the demand for evidence of regeneration, for a personal experience
of the grace of God, for the witness of the Holy Spirit with the human spirit. In
a Baptist church this is an unalterable condition of membership. The intimacy
with God observed by Max Goebel in the prayers and hymns of the
Anabaptists, and which he contrasts with the formal devotion of others, is
traceable to the universal and deep-seated conviction of the Anabaptists, that
union with Christ is essential to salvation and that a new life is the only
evidence of that union.
The second fundamental principle of the New Testament, to wit, the baptism of
believers only, was displaced with the first, for as soon as baptism became a
synonym for regeneration and water was supposed to wash away sin, it was
natural that dying or sickly, and then all infants should be brought to the priest
to have their sins washed away. It is the protest which Baptists have raised
against this innovation and revolution in gospel order that has attracted the